Perhaps no one better knows the locations of an island’s chestnut trees than adolescent boys, although their spreading branches no longer shelter the village smithy, and if truth be told, these imitators are not actually the American chestnut of lore and lyric. Rather, they are horse chestnuts, a very distant relative of the American species, whose fate every forester east of the Mississippi has mourned for the past century. Even if island boys knew the difference between an American and a horse chestnut, most would undoubtedly value the immigrant variety over the native since the large spherical nuts of a horse chestnut, called “bomby-knockers” by my five boys, are just the right size and weight for flinging at their annoying younger brothers.
We are all too used to stories of island birds that have gone extinct during the past century: the unfortunate and unfortunately named dodo of the Mauritian islands in the Indian Ocean, the brilliantly plumed Kauai Oo of Hawaii, and of course the great auk, which once nested on Maine’s outer islands all come to mind. But we rarely think of trees that have gone extinct at the hands of man, which was the fate of the American chestnut.
The original American chestnut was perhaps the single most valuable species of tree encountered by settlers. Its wood was strong as oak, but its logs were often larger and longer, which meant that wider boards and stronger beams could be milled from them, and its glowing golden sheen when sanded and finished made it an exceptionally favored cabinet wood. The actual chestnuts themselves were gathered around Thanksgiving in the hundreds of millions to add to breads, soups and puddings and as a savory for all manner of traditional colonial dishes. And chestnut trees were also plentiful, comprising more than a quarter of the standing volume of the Eastern Deciduous Forest, which stretched from Mississippi north to Midcoast Maine.
But then in a flicker, they were gone. A fungus attached to Chinese chestnut imported to the U.S. as nursery stock for the Bronx Zoo in New York in 1904 began killing American chestnuts at the zoo and then spread like wildfire. By 1920, a scant 16 years later, virtually every living American chestnut tree was dead throughout the vast majority of its range. Their ghostly visages, standing dead on their stumps, were cut throughout the 1930s and 40s, often partly worm eaten, as “wormy chestnut” cupboards became a virtue made from necessity.
By then several generations of immigrants had planted horse chestnut trees widely throughout the East, including on Maine’s islands, many of which attracted large numbers of Europeans to work as fishermen, stone carvers and quarriers. Horse chestnuts were especially valued as shade trees because they support wide spreading branches and at least superficially resemble the fallen American species. Horse chestnuts also produce large bouquets of beautiful flowers on long racemes, which attract buzzing bees and thrumming hummingbirds when they open in June. But aside from their interest to adolescent boys and aesthetes, horse chestnuts are inadequate replacements for the fallen heroic originals.
Sometime in the early 1970s in Rockport, Maine, a Girl Scout leader named Una Ames took her troop on a hike through the woods near her house on the harbor. They had stopped to rest at a stonewall when one of the girls jumped up with a prickly husk firmly attached to her backside. Una, an instinctive naturalist who knew tree lore well, wondered what this unusual husk could be and ultimately sent it off to the University of Maine, Orono, whereupon Professor Richard Campana at the forestry school identified it as a miraculously surviving American chestnut.
It turns out that small pockets of isolated American chestnuts had avoided the devastating chestnut blight in a few places in America, including a grove of about 30 trees in Rockport. Because the 1970s were also a time that genetic research had begun to take hold at universities and elsewhere, Campana and others thought there might be a more genetically resistant strain of chestnuts here in Maine that could be crossed with Chinese chestnut that had evolved with the blight and were thus immune to the effects of the fungus.
Alas, such was not the case. In the 1980s, the local chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, latter day Johnny chestnut seeds, planted the genetic crosses widely throughout Midcoast Maine and elsewhere, as did others from research centers at Syracuse University and Penn State, but they sooner or later all fell victim to the blight. But in each planting a few survived, which were again re-crossed with others and so on, but with little apparent success.
And that was the state of affairs until just recently when, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal, genetically modified chestnuts that have DNA from wheat spliced into their genes appear to grow and thrive, even when infected with the otherwise deadly fungus. Could transgenics, which have inspired whole new groups of activist opponents across the developed world, actually bring back the American chestnut tree?
It is ironic to learn that Longfellow’s village smithy in Brattle Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts stood under a spreading chestnut tree that succumbed to a much more prosaic death, cut down to widen the street in the 19th century. But with any luck, we might be on the brink reestablishing the most famous and well-regarded tree in the American East, a result which might even please island boys who can still learn to aim a bean ball but with the sweetest of all American nuts that could be roasted afterwards on the beach.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute, based in Rockland, Maine.